CX Files

BONUS EPISODE: CX Transformation in 2025 At the start of 2025, Mark Hillary from CX Files joined Chris Hague from Yoummday and Lian Rowlands from Tayma Solutions to talk about CX trends in 2025. This discussion was hosted by Yoummday and focused on some of the trends detailed in their CX Report 2025: "Transforming Customer Experiences: The AI Advantage Meets the Human Touch." https://www.linkedin....

Veronica Richards is the COO at CALLS Contact Center and VP at WW CALLS Canada. She is based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.  Veronica is also the marketing director of the Mexico Business Club in Toronto. Veronica is originally from Mexico and now works with Mexico from her base in Canada so Peter called her to ask about BPO and CX in Mexico in addition to the attractiveness of the consumer marke...

Neville Samuels is the CEO of Virtual Staff 365. He is based in Melbourne, Australia. Virtual Staff 365 offers a virtual staffing service that includes CX. In this discussion with Peter Ryan, Neville explores how virtual staffing can help to create a flexible CX environment that can work for in-house teams or BPOs. https://www.linkedin.com/in/outsourcingexperts/ https://www.virtualstaff365.com.au/...

Mark Lowe is an expert in business risk and security. He is based in Genoa, Italy. Mark is a faculty Member of the ASERI Postgraduate School of Economics and International Relations at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He is also a columinst in the Italian financial journal Fondia & Sicav. Risk and security are particularly important for CX executives. Who can forget how impossibl...

Katrin Langley is a CX expert with experience throughout her career at several major BPO companies. She is based in Tampa, Florida. Peter Ryan called Katrin to talk about first-time outsourcing. Most companies still handle their customer service processes in-house, even as it has become more and more complex in recent years. Why do companies still want to retain these processes and what approach c...

Jose Paz is the founder and CEO of Startups BPO. He is based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Jose has been living and breathing BPO recruitment for many years. In this conversation with Peter Ryan he explores CX recruitment trends in Honduras and the wider nearshore US area. What are agents expecting when they apply for CX jobs in the 2020s and what is the reality? How can modern CX brands be creating r...

Claas van Delden  is the Chief Growth Officer at yoummday. He is based in Munich, Germany. Yoummday is a proprietary technology platform for managing remote workforces - what we have summarized on this podcast in the past as 'Gig CX'. Yoummday has a diverse global talent pool of 15,000+ sales and customer care freelancers available. Mark Hillary called Claas to talk about the issues around providi...

Ted Nardin is the VP of Customer Success & Value Add at Teleperformance Jamaica. Ted has spent years researching CX. He recently joined Teleperformance and Mark saw a LinkedIn update with this new job title focusing on customer success and value add. Mark called Ted to discuss this idea. How can BPOs put business success on the table and talk to clients about how to add value in the customer relat...

John Dinardo is the CEO and president of Nordia, a Canadian CX specialist with over 10,000 employees on the team. Nordia is the largest BPO in Canada. Peter Ryan and John are both based in Montreal, so this is a local Canadian edition. Bell Canada created Nordia back in 1999, but a quarter of a century on they are now looking at many new opportuntiies and areas of business. John talked about expan...

Vidya Ravichandran is the CEO of UnifyCX. She is based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. In this conversation with Peter Ryan, Vidya talks about the evolution of GlowTouch Technologies into UnifyCX, how technology is changing the BPO industry, and how CX and BPO is evolving as technology solutions become more integral to customer interactions. As customers demand more complex solutions the BPO communi...

The new (July 2024) UK government just announced their budget plans for the year ahead. Several measures look like they could impact the BPO and CX industries. In this special extra edition of the CX Files, Peter Ryan called a few UK-based friends of the podcast to ask for their views on the challenges and opportunities they can see in the latest UK budget... Featuring a discussion with... Alistai...

Tanya Scotece is also known as 'Dr T.' She is a Professor and Program Coordinator at Miami Dade College focused on funeral service education. Tanya is also a senior placement specialist with Sunshine Senior Placement, helping familes find an assisted living facility for their loved ones. Tanya is a licensed funeral director and has direct experience managing a funeral home and crematorium. The fun...

Almost everyone in the CX environment knows about B2B sales. BPO companies need to sell to clients. CX software companies need to sell to customer service teams or BPOs. Most people in this industry are working for specialist companies selling services to another company. Mark Hillary has just written a book about this - how do B2B companies sell to each other and how has it changed since the Covi...

Neal Topf is the founder and President of Callzilla. He is based in Miami, Florida. Callzilla is a CX specialist based in the US, but also with delivery centers in Colombia and South Africa. Peter Ryan called Neal for a conversation about corporate culture - in particular culture inside the BPO environment. Neal recently posted on LinkedIn that a prospective client was impressed with the Callzilla...

Peter has recently been touring Asia, including some time meeting CX and BPO experts in the Philippines. Mark called Peter in Tokyo to talk about his recent time in the Philippines. What is going on in CX over there right now and do they need to reinvent their approach to communications and promoting what they can do?  When will we see Philippines BPO 2.0? https://www.ibpap.org/ https://ryanadviso...

The CX Alliance is a brand new CX trade association launched in September 2024 in the UK. It is being launched by Karen Howard, MD of The Retail Bulletin (TRB) and the partnership director of the CXA is Isobel Rogers. They aim to publish information, research, and host events all focused on various aspects of CX. Mark Hillary talked to Isobel and Karen to find out more about how this initiative go...

Graham Brown is the SVP EMEA Sales for Alorica. He is based at Leicester in the UK. In some parts of the world, like Europe, brands need to offer a customer experience in many different languages. For major languages this is not a problem. It's relatively easy to find French and English speakers, but some languages can be hard to support and often they are not even economic to support.  What if yo...

This week we have two guests rather than the usual one! Chris Gillen is the CEO of A Closer Look. He is based just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Stephen Loynd is the founder and Principal Analyst at TrendzOwl. He is based in Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington DC. Both of these leading thinkers have spoken before at the CX Outsourcers conference about how AI is changing the CX industry....

Michael Clark is the founder of CXTT Consulting. He is based in Sydney, Australia. Michael has been recognised in 2023 in the Top 100 Contact Centre Influencers in APAC, and in 2022 as a Top 50 Small Business Leader. Peter Ryan called Michael to talk technology and the tech stack required to make modern CX processes work well. We all know that multiple types of technology have become important for...

Once you are into CX, you never leave... this summarises how Martin Anderson explains the journey he has taken over the past 21 years building the Lemon Contact Centre near to Durham in the north-east of the UK. Peter Ryan talks to Martin about the entrepreneurial nature of BPO and CX, how he got started, and how he manages to compete in a business where the competition can be both local and globa...

Jonas Berggren is the Head of Global Accounts EMEA at Transcom. He is also a member of the Transcom EMEA management team. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Jonas has a long history designing customer experience processes, but he is also well known as an innovative thought leader. He publishes a popular LinkedIn newsletter titled "Transform Customer Service" that explores the future transformation...

Leo Lopez is the co-founder and principal consultant at Calltastic, an advisory firm focused on helping startups and small businesses. He is based in Los Angeles, California.  Leo has over 30 years experience in contact center operations and he is now using this expertise to help startups improve their customer service processes. In this conversation with Peter Ryan he outlines the top five mistak...

FormIGA was launched in London in June this year. It's the Industry for Good Alliance for technology and business services and is a joint venture between the IAOP and the GSA. Alistair Niederer heads up the ESG initiatives for the GSA so he talked to Mark Hillary about what this new alliance is doing and how it is more than just another industry body publishing white papers on ESG... https://www.l...

Stephen Peattie is a Director at Kinetic GB and HybridWorkSmart. He is based near to Leicester, in the UK Midlands. Daniel Castilla is the co-founder and MD of Alliance BPO Services. He is based in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Daniel and Stephen both visited Fiji on a recent mission to explore current and potential BPO and CX services from Fiji. Fiji is a small island nation of around one million p...

Leigh Hopwood is the CEO of CCMA (Call Centre Management Association) and Chair of the European Customer Contact Alliance. She is based in London, UK. Peter recently attended a CCMA event in Manchester focused on the buy-side - the companies that need to create their own CX team or buy in expertise from a specialist BPO. He called Leigh to talk about the event and to discuess what buyers are reall...